by Tinnean
No, something like that wouldn’t do for Mrs. Mann. “How about a plastic cup?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thanks.” I took it from her. Mrs. Mann’s private room would have a bathroom attached to it. I’d get the water there.
“Um… excuse me, sir, but you do know visiting hours are over?”
“I know. I haven’t been able to get up here to see Portia Mann before now. I’ll just drop off these flowers and leave.”
“You’re here to see Mrs. Mann? The poor lady. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet. Her family has been with her the past couple of days. Are you another one of her brothers?”
“Yeah.” I never let bending the truth stop me.
“You don’t look very much like them.”
“I take after my father.” I wasn’t usually so polite. Jesus, Mann must be rubbing off on me.
“I see. Well, I guess it’s okay, then. She’s in room 624. Down in that direction. But not too long, okay?”
“Okay.” I walked down the corridor and pushed open the door of the private room.
Quinn was bent over his mother’s body, his shoulders shaking, and for a second my gut clenched and I thought she was dead, but then I noticed there was a tiny smile on her lips and she was stroking his hair.
I backed out of the room. I didn’t want Quinn to know I’d seen him in a weak moment—I knew I’d hate it like hell if our positions had been reversed. I’d give him a chance to get himself under control.
I said, loudly enough for him to hear, “Nurse, have you seen Quinn Mann anywhere? Oh, he’s in this room? Thanks.”
An aide walking by gave me a look and detoured around me, but I ignored her. Another couple of seconds, and I entered the room.
Quinn had himself together. His eyes were a little red, but that could be attributed to the crummy cot he’d no doubt been sleeping on.
“Mann. How is she?”
“Conscious.” He studied my face. “Where have you been, Mark?”
I’d give him the condensed version later. I focused my attention on his mother. “You’ve got a couple of shiners, Mrs. Mann.” I grinned at her. “Real beauts.”
“I imagine I look like a raccoon. What happened?” For someone who’d just regained consciousness, she was surprisingly together.
“What do you remember?”
She looked amused, and that was when I really started believing she would make it. “It always drove your father wild when I did that, Quinton, answered a question with a question. It’s a Sebring trait, you know.”
That wasn’t the only Sebring trait. Honorable, steadfast, and loyal to the death, the Sebrings had a long tradition of serving their country. She was a worthy daughter of that line. I looked over at Quinn, watching his mother with such love in his eyes. He was a worthy son.
“Before we go into what I remember, how is Gregor?”
“Better than you, Mrs. Mann.” I wasn’t surprised she’d ask about him. She was one very classy lady. “He’s got a broken collarbone from the airbag, and his ankle is kind of banged up, but otherwise he’s in fairly decent shape.” I grinned at Quinn, who was giving me a look. I knew he was wondering how I’d gotten my information. He didn’t need to know how simple it was to hack into the hospital’s computer system. Well, simple for me. “Now that you’re with us again, I imagine he’ll be coming to see for himself how you are.”
“How badly am I injured?” Her breathing was shallow, and her lips were pale. I could see her concern.
“Concussion, bruised ribs, burn from the seat belt. Fractured hip they’ve repaired with a pin,” I rattled off breezily, as if they were no big thing. There would be time later to mention her collapsed lung, especially since it had been successfully re-inflated before they’d taken her to surgery. “You’re going to need a doctor’s note when you fly, Mrs. Mann, or the metal detectors will nab you. Oh, and they had to yank your spleen.”
“Mark, she’s my mother.” Quinn sounded ticked.
Was he pissed because I’d told his mother about her injuries? I didn’t believe in coddling people just because they were sick or injured, but he knew her better than I did, and maybe she was one of those people who needed to have bad news broken to them gradually. Although that didn’t sound like the Portia Mann I’d learned about. She’d taken the news of her husband’s death with a stiff upper lip, and if she’d wept, she had done so in private.
And when her son had been kidnapped, her eyes had been steady and fierce.
“Fine, Mann.” I studied his eyes, and there seemed to be relief in them. Had he been uncertain as to how to break the news to her? I nodded at him, a little relieved myself. “You go ahead and tell her.”
“Never mind. Would you like some water, Mother?”
“Please.”
“Can you tell us what you remember now?” I asked after she’d had a few sips.
“A car hit us. Gregor did his best to…. But the car just kept hitting us, and then oncoming traffic did the rest.”
“It wasn’t an accident, a car hydroplaning on a wet road.” I had a feeling Mrs. Mann was aware of that. “It was too deliberate.”
Quinn’s mouth was set in a grim line. Listening to her talk about what we had heard over the phone…. He had come very close to losing her, not through an act of God, but by an act of man.
“What did you find out, Mark?”
I kept it short and sweet, finishing with a description of the weapon Folana Fournaise had used to work over Elizabeth Wexler’s face.
“A kongo?”
“You’re familiar with it, Mrs. Mann?”
“That was the weapon of choice of someone with whom I was very close.”
“Yeah? You know some pretty interesting people.” I hadn’t originally planned to investigate Quinn’s mother, but I’d been intrigued by all her Sebring traits, and I had. I’d learned that she and Folana Fournaise had been in London at the same time, when Portia Sebring had been sent to Great Britain to make her come-out back in the late fifties—but how did simply being in the same city result in Folana Fournaise calling Mrs. Mann her dear friend? And what was up with the violets I’d been asked to give her? I’d have to look into this. “Mrs. Wexler is going to need serious plastic surgery. I was asked to give you this.” I put the tiny bouquet of violets in her hand.
“Thank you, Mark.”
“I’ll be damned if I know how a woman got there before I did.” Although considering it was Folana Fournaise— Fuck it, I had other things to worry about. I went to a door, and as I’d suspected, it opened into a bathroom. I turned on the water and filled the plastic cup.
“Mark. Where does Wexler stand in all this?”
“It was Wexler’s aide driving the car that hit your mother and Novotny. He lived long enough to talk. He said the senator wasn’t happy that you kept getting in his way, Quinn.” I put the cup on the bedside table. “He saw it as a son’s jealousy at the probability of having his father replaced by someone else.”
“‘Probability’?”
“I don’t want to be crude about it, but he never doubted he could get in your bed, Mrs. Mann.”
“Trust me, he would have regretted such a moronic idea for what was left of his pathetic life.”
“Which wouldn’t be too long?” Yeah, I could believe that.
Quinn hadn’t been paying attention. “All he had to do was get me out of the way.” He met my eyes, and in his was the knowledge that it should have been him in that car.
“Yeah. You were the target, Quinn.” I really had killed Lapin too quickly.
“Where is the senator?”
“He’s lying low. The cops brought him in to identify his aide’s body.” Samuels, my connection in the DCPD had gotten that information to me. All I’d had to do was leave the wreck for some Good Samaritan to find, call 911, and have the meat wagon come take the body to the morgue, where Smitty would be waiting to do the autopsy. “Wexler professed profound shock when he was told that Lapi
n had been behind the wheel of the car that drove yours off the road. Said he was devastated to hear you’d been injured.”
“Explain, if you please, Mark.” God, Quinn being all tough was a turn-on.
“Lapin left a paper trail indicating he was the one who brought the Beemer to the shop and insisted on a speedy repair. The cops followed it.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Me? Not at all. That was just good, solid police work, baby.” Fuck, that had slipped out. Quinn didn’t seem bothered by the pet name, but I hoped his mother was too groggy to pick up on it.
“With a little assist from you.”
I ignored that. “Wexler fell apart when he learned you were in the car, Mrs. Mann. He started to swear that Lapin had acted completely on his own, but the son of a bitch is a politician to the core, and he tap danced his way around that.” But he wouldn’t be able to tap dance around me. “Cops let him go.”
“Will it be possible to keep Wexler’s name out of this?”
What the fuck? “Mrs. Mann, you can’t be willing to let the man get away with this.” Had that blow to the head softened her brains? From the corner of my eye, I saw Quinn’s expression. There was savage intensity in it. “What am I missing?”
“My uncles are retired CIA, Mark. If they find out that Wexler was personally behind the accident that left my mother in a hospital bed, they’ll go after him themselves.”
That might be true, but the key word was “retired.” They’d have lost their edge.
Quinn must have seen I wasn’t buying it, and he scowled at me. “I won’t be able to press criminal charges against Richard Wexler, that would be less than useless, but I fully intend to press civil charges against him. I don’t want you involved.”
“Aw, baby. Here I thought I was almost family.” I’d said it to bust his chops, but as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized—not how true they were, but how much I wanted them to be true. I waited for that little voice in my mind to sneer, You are so fucking fucked! But to my surprise, it wasn’t anywhere around. And now that I came to think of it, it hadn’t been around for some time.
Cool.
“Mark.” I turned my attention back to Quinn. “You like my mother. Wexler was the base cause of her injuries. Nothing less than his death will suit you.”
He was right. And I could make it last a Very. Long. Time. “Are you calling me uncivilized, Quinn? I’m cut to the quick.”
“And I’m tired,” Mrs. Mann said. Her voice was faint. “And I hurt.”
“Mother! What can I do?”
“Would you mind asking the nurse for some pain medication, Quinton?” She sounded nothing like the indomitable woman I’d grown to know. I studied her carefully, but she was lying back, her eyes closed. The violets had spilled onto the bed, forgotten, and she plucked at the hospital blanket.
“Mark, behave,” Quinn ordered.
I opened my mouth to say something like “Don’t I always?”. But I didn’t. He was watching his mother, and there were white lines around his mouth. He didn’t need any shit.
“Mother, I’ll be right back.”
“Of course, sweetheart.” As soon as he left, she leaned up and pinned me with a stare from her cool eyes. “I wanted to talk to you alone, Mark.”
“Mrs. Mann, you aren’t going to get on my case about not doing anything, are you?”
“No, Mark. We both know you aren’t going to pay any heed to Quinton in this matter.” As battered as she was, her gaze was stony. I should have known she hadn’t lost her edge. She’d not only been married to an intelligence officer, but she’d been born into a family that had served the United States from the time it had been a scattered handful of colonies. “Just see you don’t get caught.”
“No, ma’am.” No one knew I’d been involved with Lapin’s “accident.” No one would know I was involved with whatever I decided to do to Wexler.
She nodded as if satisfied with my assurance. “Richard Wexler engineered the accident that could well have killed my son. If I weren’t confined to this bed, I’d go after him myself.” She reached for my arm and squeezed tightly. “I want him to pay. I don’t want him dead, however. That would be too easy.”
I did like the way she thought.
“A man who worships power….” I mused as I rested my hand on the hand that still gripped my arm. “How would stripping him of his Senate seat do for a start?”
“For a start.” She released my arm and lay back on the bed. “Will the police question Quinton?”
“For?”
“Don’t be obtuse, Mark. You know I’m talking about Lapin’s death.”
“Why would they? He’s been here in the hospital since early Sunday morning. Besides, the autopsy report will come back that his blood alcohol level was off the chart. Whether that was because he had a guilty conscience or an alcohol abuse problem, the cops won’t know or care.” They were going to be leaned on by someone high up in the CIA to bury this case. Holmes might have a wild hair up his ass about Quinn, but he’d do whatever it took to keep Wexler’s name out of it. Well, keep it more out of it than it already was.
“You’ll see Quinton is kept safe.”
I wasn’t going to say he was a big boy who could take care of himself. This was too important to both of us for me to be flip. “They’ll have to go through me to get to him.”
“Thank you, Mark.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am.” I gathered up the violets. When Quinn returned with the nurse, an older woman wearing a cardigan and with a stethoscope looped around her neck, I was putting the violets into the cup on the bedside table.
The nurse checked Mrs. Mann’s vital signs, checked the plastic band around her wrist, and then smiled at us. “This will just take a moment, gentlemen.” We waited while she injected the narcotic into Mrs. Mann’s IV line. After a second, the nurse said, “Done. This is Dilaudid. It will start to work pretty quickly. Meanwhile, I’ll let your doctor know you’re with us once more.” She dropped the syringe into a red container on the wall and walked out.
Mrs. Mann opened her eyes, and I could tell she was feeling no pain already.
“Where are the clothes I wore to the ball?”
“They’re ruined, Mother. They had to be cut off you.”
“Even your father’s lynx?” Her lips trembled, and then she firmed them. “Of course. How foolish of me not to realize.” She sighed, and the Dilaudid must have kicked in, because she was asleep just like that.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead, surprising myself. “Sleep well, ma’am,” I murmured.
And I’d swear she smiled.
Quinn had been staring at her. Now he turned on his heel, went to a closet, and removed a plastic bag. He gestured toward the door, and I followed him out into the corridor. He reached into the bag and brought out a handful of the warm cream fur of his mother’s coat. His eyes were suspiciously bright.
He let the fur drop back into the bag and thrust it at me.
“Mark, make sure nothing else happens to this coat.”
“I know someone who should be able to repair it.”
“Is he good? Never mind; if you’re recommending him, of course he’s good. Cost is no object.”
“You had to tell me that?”
He gave a bitter laugh and glanced away from me. “Some spook I am, aren’t I? Totally useless….” A strangled sound escaped his lips. “You had it right. I am getting soft.”
“Are you—I never said you were soft!”
“In the car. ‘Don’t get soft on me now, Mann,’ you said.”
Well, yeah, but I hadn’t wanted him falling apart when I didn’t have two free arms to hold him. I opened my mouth to object, but he kept on talking.
“It doesn’t matter how you meant it. It’s the truth. You must be sorry you ever got involved with me.”
What? “Shut up, Mann. Just shut the fuck up!” I looked around. “Jesus, you pick a hell of a place to….” We couldn’t have thi
s conversation in a hospital corridor at this time of night. It was too quiet, and sound would carry.
“Vincent?”
“C’mere.” I dragged him back into his mother’s room, dropped the bag onto a chair, and then hauled him into the bathroom and closed the door. “What kind of an asshole do you take me for that I’d think less of you for being upset because your mother was injured?”
“I’m fucking pathetic.”
I smacked the back of his head, and he gave me a stunned look. “You’re a fucking idiot is what you are, Mann.” I kept my voice down, even though the odds of disturbing his mother were slim. “Do you know how much I envy you having a mother like Portia? Smart, classy, a real lady…. And she fucking loves you!”
“Of course she loves me! I never doubted that! But look at me! I didn’t fall apart because she’s in that goddamned hospital bed! I fell apart because of a stupid, fucking coat!”
“Her coat was a catalyst, that’s all.” I gave him a shove. “Knowing what it’s meant to her all these years, seeing how it had to be cut off her, it made you realize how close you’d come to losing her. Look, Quinn, I’m not a headshrinker. All I know is you’d have to be the coldest son of a bitch in the world not to have some kind of reaction to the last few days.”
But him thinking I’d walk out on him because he’d been upset by his mother’s condition wasn’t a reaction I’d expected.
Fuck it. I’d think about that later, when this fucking crisis was averted.
He blinked, touched his tongue to his lip. “And you… you don’t think I’m cold?”
“Get real. Oh, you put up a damn good front, but you’re one of the hottest men I’ve ever met.” I took a handkerchief from my pocket and shoved it into his hand. “Here. Blow your nose.”
“Thanks.” His smile was crooked. “I’m sorry.” He blew his nose.
“Enough, Mann.” I growled at him. “Either you’re telling me you’re sorry, or you’re thanking me. I’m here for you.” It was my turn to blink. I was stunned to hear those words come out of my mouth.
